Things We Dare Not Do
As international film festivals continue to figure out their way in the midst of the current health crisis, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival has revealed its selections for this year’s edition, which will be available to accredited members of the press and film industry, and a limited selection to Canadian audiences via the streaming platform CBC Gem.
The 2020 edition of the Canadian film festival includes a significant selection of more than a dozen Latin American titles both in their competitive and non-competitive sections. The International Spectrum competition will host the international premiere of 499 and A Colombian Family.
Mexican-born American director Rodrigo Reyes commemorates the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest of Mexico with his film 499. Through the eyes of a ghostly conquistador Reyes recreates Hernán Cortez’s epic journey from the coasts of Veracruz to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the site of contemporary Mexico City. As the anachronistic fictional character interacts with real victims and subjects of Mexico’s failed drug wars, the filmmaker portrays the country’s current humanitarian crisis as part of a vicious and unfinished colonial project, still in motion, nearly five-hundred years later.
Tanja Wol Sørensen’s A Colombian Family is set against the backdrop of Colombia’s fraught peace treaty with the FARC, meant to end more than 50 years of armed conflict. A mother and daughter begin their own journey towards reconciliation. Yira, a doctor living in exile in Cuba for the past 12 years, finally sees an opportunity for her family to be reunited and begs her mother to join her. But Ruby, a human right devoted defender, is reluctant to leave, especially when social leaders are still being killed at an alarming rate.
Landfall
The World Showcase non-competitive section will screen five Latin American titles: the Puerto Rican film Landfall by Cecillia Aldarondo, Bruno Santamaría’s Things We Dare Not Do / Cosas que no hacemos from Mexico, Chile’s The Mole Agent / El agente topo by Maite Alberdi, the Argentine documentary Mother-Child Niña mamá by Andrea Testa, and A Loss of Something Ever Felt by Colombian director Carlos Eduardo Lesmes.
Landfall analyzes the aftermath of natural and economic disaster in Puerto Rico. After the pass of a deadly Category 5 hurricane, director Aldarondo (Memories of a Penitent Heart) travels throughout the island in an attempt to understand what has happened to her country. As stated by Charlotte Selb: “Her must-see film offers a sharp-eyed analysis of disaster capitalism and a stirring portrait of trauma and resistance.”
Shot in an apparently idyllic town in the Pacific coast, Things We Dare Not Do follows Ñoño, a 16-year-old boy facing the reality of the machismo and transphobia that surrounds him, after he reveals to his family that he wants to live life as a woman.
In The Mole Agent, when a family becomes concerned about their mother’s wellbeing in a retirement home, private investigator Romulo hires Sergio, an 83 year-old man who becomes a new resident–and a mole inside the home, who struggles to balance his assignment with becoming increasingly involved in the lives of several residents.
The Mole Agent
Mother-Child a is a film about the need to legalize abortion in Argentina, were every three hours a girl under the age of 15 is forced to give birth. Shot in the intimacy of a public hospital’s consulting rooms, Andrea Testa’s fly-on-the-wall documentary reveals a few of the stories hidden behind the statistics.
In A Loss of Something Ever Felt, at the request of her mother Hille, Eeva arrives from Estonia to Bogotá, Colombia to look for her drug- addicted and alcoholic half-brother Lauri. In her quest to find Lauri, Eeva manages to rediscover and reconnect with the fragile love she and her brother once shared.
Competing in the Canadian Spectrum section, Michèle Stephenson’s Stateless traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, revealing the personal impact of institutionalized racism and oppression through the journey of electoral hopeful Rosa Iris.
Participating in its North American premiere in the Makers section, Panquiaco by Panamanian visual artist and filmmaker Ana Elena Tejeras, follows Cebaldo, an indigenous dule from Panama who works as a fishermen's assistant in a town in northern Portugal and suffers of nostalgia. In his loneliness, memories take him away from his daily routine, immersing him in a journey back to his village, where a botanical doctor confronts him with the impossibility of returning to the past.
Panquiaco
In Once Upon a Time in Venezuela / Érase una vez en Venezuela, having its Canadian premiere in the To Conserve & Protect section, Venezuelan filmmaker Anabel Rodríguez Ríos gives us an independent documentary perspective on her country. Her film is set in the small fishing village of Congo Mirador on Lake Maracaibo. The film focuses on two characters: Tamara, a Chavist party representative; and Natalie, a struggling teacher who supports the opposition. As the village prepares for a parliamentary election, we witness how the two women clash over their political differences.
In Breaking the Silence by Priscila Padilla, participating in the Persister section of the festival, Luz, an Indigenous woman from Colombia leaves her Emberá Chamí community for Bogotá as she grapples with her experience of female genital mutilation. Far from her family, Luz struggles to make her way in the relentless city, until she meets Claudia, a fellow Emberá Chamí and activist. Both women will try to to start a dialogue with other Indigenous women and encourage them to make critical and urgent changes to end the practice of female genital mutilation.
Nuria Frigola Torrent’s first feature, The Song of the Butterflies screening in the Artscapes section of the festival, follows Rember Yahuarcani, an indigenous painter from the White Heron clan of the Uitoto Nation in Peru. Leaving his community and family behind, he pursues his painting career in Lima. Creatively blocked he returns to his home and realizes the key to his inspiration is to confront his dark past and the horrors his community faced as a result of the rubber boom in Peru.
The films Mucho Mucho Amor about an extravagant Puerto Rican TV personality directed by Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch, and We Are As Gods, co-directed by U.S. Latinx cinematographer David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg were both included in the program as Special Presentations.
Mucho, Mucho Amor
Walter Mercado, who was a Puerto Rican gender nonconforming psychic and TV personality watched by over 120 million viewers at his peak, he enchanted and dazzled television audiences with his mystical persona and extravagant costumes of sequined capes and opulent jewelry. In Mucho Mucho Amor directors Costantini and Tabsch investigate his final years.
Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of Whole Earth Catalog, and guru to Steve Jobs and other tech wizards, is profiled in Alvarado and Sussberg’s We Are As Gods. Through unfettered access, memorable archival footage, and candid interviews (Brian Eno, Peter Coyote), the film charts Brand’s dramatic course from counterculture to cyberculture icon.
The shorts sections will present Recording Art directed by Bruno Moreschi and Gabriel Pereira from Brazil; Sex Assistant directed by Venezuelan Andrés Gonzales Majul; from El Salvador, Unforgivable by Marlén Viñayo; The Last Miller, a Colombian/Canadian production, co-directed by Juan Baquero and Felipe Macia; from Argentina, Playback by Agustina Comedi; and Día de la Madre by Anshley Brandon and Dennis Höhne from the U.S. Additionally, the virtual reality short film The Curious Life of Bill Mont, a Canadian production directed by Colombian journalist Andrea Patiño Contreras and Katrina Sorrentino, will have its International Premiere as part of the DocX section.
Compiled by Juan Medina.
